Tag Archives: Medicare

The Folly of Paul Krugman

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In yesterday’s New York Times Paul Krugman has a column “Fight the Future” in which he says that “fiscal contraction” is “undermining what might otherwise have been a fairly vigorous recovery” and that  focusing on long run fiscal sustainability “isn’t a way of being responsible”.  He compares our fiscal problems with global warming and says that the “uncertainty about the impact of greenhouse gases on global temperatures actually strengthens the case for action, to head off the risk of catastrophe”.  But “delaying action on entitlement reform has no comparable cost”.  He even says that seeking a “grand bargain” that links reduced austerity now to longer-run fiscal changes is harmful because it would involve negotiating with untrustworthy Republicans!
First of all, there has been no real fiscal austerity in the past five years.  Federal expenditures took a huge jump from 2008 to 2009 and have increased each year since, in spite of huge deficits.  The sequester will not cut spending in 2013 compared with 2012 but only slow down the rate of increase.  There is little, if any, uncertainty about how fast the costs of healthcare in general, and Medicare in particular, will increase in the years ahead.  The current slowdown in healthcare costs in the last few years still leaves it growing at twice the rate of increase of GDP.  Demographics alone clearly show that the cost of Medicare will start increasing even more rapidly in just a few years from now.
Mr. Krugman concludes by saying that “influential people should stop using the future as an excuse for inaction.  The clear and present danger is mass unemployment, and we should deal with it, now.”  I basically agree with him!  The question is how!  Should we deal with it by artificial stimulation (bigger deficits and more debt) or rather by boosting the private sector with tax reform and strategic deregulation?  It takes two to tango and Mr. Krugman doesn’t help by constantly ridiculing the Republicans!

Free Market Healthcare in America: How Do We Get There?

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Almost everyone agrees that healthcare in the U.S. is way too expensive but how do we change to a better system?  Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy have laid out a roadmap to do this: “The future of free-market healthcare”.  Here is the essence of their plan: 1) start with what we will soon have under Obamacare: subsidized health-insurance exchanges; 2) limit subsidies in the exchanges to incomes up to 300% of the federal poverty level as in Massachusetts and also limit the growth of subsidies to the overall growth rate of the economy; 3) use the exchanges for Medicare reform by raising the eligibility age for Medicare by 3 months each year.  Retirees would then gradually migrate into the defined contribution system of the exchanges; 4) gradually shift Medicaid enrollees into the exchanges.  The exchanges would allow them to move up the income ladder while maintaining their health insurance.
Eventually all low income and retired  Americans would become part of a unified health-insurance system based on the exchanges which would provide subsidies as needed.  I would add one additional feature to this system:  remove the tax exemption from employer provided insurance.  This would, of course, create healthcare cost consciousness amongst employees.  Employers could still offer a health insurance package to their employees but it would become part of their taxable compensation.  They might decide to join an exchange instead for a better deal.
Such a system as outlined above is based on the Swiss free market model.  The Swiss choose their own doctors and have short waiting times for appointments.  The cost of healthcare in Switzerland is about half as much per person as in the U.S. so we would achieve a huge savings.  We have got to make big changes in the way we deliver and pay for healthcare in the U.S. and here is one way to do it!

Colonoscopies Show Why American Health Care is So Expensive

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Yesterday’s New York Times has an excellent article, “The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill”, which uses a detailed analysis of the cost of colonoscopies to show why American healthcare is so expensive.  In the U.S. an insurance company pays about $3500 – $4000 for a colonoscopy compared with the cost for the procedure in Europe of between $400 – $800.  Also the price can vary enormously, from as little as $665 (in Utah) to as much as $8577 (in New York City).  There are all sorts of reasons for this huge variation in cost, for example, whether or not an anesthesiologist is used as well as a gastroenterologist, and whether the procedure is performed in a surgical center rather than in a doctor’s office.
The basic problem, of course, is that in the U.S. nobody is sufficiently responsible for the bottom line.  The patient isn’t responsible because the bill is paid by the insurance company.  The insurance company negotiates with healthcare providers but the insurance premium is paid by the patient’s employer.  If the insurance company has to pay too much in claims one year, then it just raises insurance premiums for the following year.
The problem is getting so serious that it will soon have to be dealt with in a comprehensive way.  There are essentially two different ways to proceed.  One is to have a single payer system like most of Europe and Canada.  Healthcare would be tightly controlled by the federal government which would set prices and ration care.  The cost of healthcare would be controlled but we’d be giving up a great deal of personal freedom in return.  Basically it would amount to expanding Medicare into a rigidly prescribed national healthcare system.
The alternative is to adopt a new payment system which makes each of us directly responsible for the cost of our own healthcare.  The best way to accomplish this is to remove the tax exemption from employer provided health insurance.  Health insurance could still be provided by an employer but it would be considered a part of total salary and be taxed as such.  Then the employee, as well as any self-employed person, would have a direct personal stake in setting up an efficient health insurance plan to keep the cost of healthcare under control.
Americans put great emphasis on personal freedom and responsibility and I believe that most of us would prefer this latter free market approach to healthcare rather than a single payer system like what most of the rest of the world has!

Is Medicare Out of the Woods?

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The Medicare Trustees have just released their annual report and, according to today’s Wall Street Journal, “Medicare Trustees’ Report Eases Concerns on Funding”.  In 2012 Medicare expenses, most of which are paid out of general government tax revenue, amounted to $574 billion, up 4.6% from 2011.  Although this is a smaller annual increase than usual, it still represents a rate of growth which is much too fast to be sustainable over the long run.  After all, the economy (i.e. GDP) is only growing at a rate of 2% per year and so a rate of 4.6% for Medicare is more than twice as fast as the economy is growing.  Such a rapid rate of growth for Medicare has been going on for many years and simply cannot be continued much longer.
The problem is that Medicare is an open ended entitlement program which pays whatever is needed by its currently 50.7 million retired enrollees, whose number is also increasing rapidly.  The only way that Medicare can possibly survive indefinitely is to be turned into a defined contribution program whereby each enrollee’s annual support is limited to a fixed amount.  Of course, this places responsibility on each enrollee to pay attention to the cost of her/his own medical care.  This is a big change from the present system of government responsibility and so it will take a major change of thinking to make such a big switchover.  But a new system can be phased in over time so that everyone can get used to it.
We really only have two choices.  We can postpone any action along these lines until the cost of the current system is so outlandish that the government is given the authority to severely ration healthcare for senior citizens.  The alternative is to set up, and phase in, a new system so that every enrollee bears responsibility for the cost of her/his own care.  Right now we have the luxury of deciding which of these two systems we want to adopt.  But if we put off the choice much longer, it will be forced upon us by financial necessity.

Is Voucher Really a Dirty Word?

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The current issue (May 25, 2013) of the Economist has an excellent article “Entitlements in America”, which tackles the broad issues of entitlement spending and health care inflation in America.  There are many aspects of this whole problem but let’s focus here on “Medicare, the hardest part of the budget”, as the Economist says and with which I totally agree.  We cannot get government spending under control, i.e. deficits on a steep downward path, until we figure out how to control the cost of Medicare.
The Economist makes some standard recommendations, such as increasing the eligibility age from 65 to 67 (as for Social Security) and raising premiums on the well-to-do (means testing).  These are good ideas but not large enough in scope to make a significant dent on the problem.  Somehow or other we need to convert Medicare from a defined benefit program (with no cap on expenses) to the same kind of limited defined contribution program which everyone else has through private insurance.  But how can we accomplish this within our political process?  Republican House Budget Chair Paul Ryan has taken an enormous amount of heat for proposing to make this switch with a premium support or “voucher” plan.  It is much too easy for Democrats to accuse him of trying to destroy Medicare when he’s really just trying to save it by making it financially sound.
The Economist proposes converting the Federal Employee Health Benefits program into a voucher system as an experiment to see if it saves money.  Right now FEHB offers unlimited benefits with federal employees paying 35% of the cost.  This makes FEHB open ended with no constraint on overall spending, which is exactly the problem with Medicare.  Each federal employee would have an annual health benefit amount and would have to decide on what kind of health insurance benefit to purchase with the fixed amount, supplementing with personal funds if desired.  If a voucher program for federal employees saves money for the federal government, as it undoubtedly would, then we could confidently convert Medicare to a similarly system.
We have to make big changes in our current Medicare program and here is an excellent suggestion for one possible way to do it!

Is Emphasis on Deficit Reduction Impeding Recovery?

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The New York Times reported on May 9, 2013 that “Emphasis on Deficit Reduction
Is Seen by Economists as Impeding Recovery”.  According to the reporter, “Tax increases and especially spending cuts, the critics say, take money from an economy that still needs stimulus now, and is getting it only through the expansionary
monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.  … In all of this time, the president has fought unsuccessfully to combine deficit reduction, including spending cuts and tax increases, with spending increases and targeted tax cuts for job-creation initiatives in areas like
infrastructure, manufacturing, research and education.”
The $845 billion deficit for the current year, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, hardly represents austerity, and is in fact a massive stimulus.  The president says that he wants “sensible” deficit reduction, but simply offsetting sequester
spending cuts and higher taxes on the wealthy with other spending increases and
targeted tax cuts as above, really amounts to no deficit reduction at all.
Most observers agree that it is entitlement spending, especially for Medicare and Medicaid, which is the main driver of the national debt.  Serious deficit reduction will not be achieved by further whittling away at discretionary spending, as wasteful as
some of it is.  The president has proposed changing the way the Consumer Price Index is computed, by switching to a “chained CPI” which will save the federal government about $30 billion per year.  This is a worthwhile change to make but represents a relatively modest savings by itself.
If the Democrats want to spend more money on “investments” and other forms of
fiscal stimulus, to try to speed up the recovery, they will have to get on board with serious reform of health entitlements.  The rapidly exploding national debt is a far too serious and urgent problem to ignore any longer.  The president might say that it should be addressed in a sensible manner, but postponement is no longer a sensible option.

Why is American Health Care So Expensive?

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In the May 5, 2013, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat “What Health Insurance Doesn’t Do”, discusses a recent Oregon Medicaid experiment which shows that the Medicaid program improves health outcomes only slightly even though it does help people avoid huge medical bills.  As Mr. Douthat goes on to explain, the Oregon result offers a valuable suggestion for how to make American health care overall much more efficient and less costly.
The problem is that our health insurance system does not function like any other type of insurance.  All other types of insurance such as for house or car protect only against actual disasters like a house burning down and not routine maintenance repairs which affect all of us on a regular basis.  In other words, health insurance could and should be restricted to very expensive treatments such as for cancer, for example.  Routine health problems, which affect everyone over a lifetime, even including end of life care, can and should be paid for with mechanisms such as health savings accounts, which can be rolled over from one year to the next.
A more elaborate discussion of the inefficiency of American health insurance, and how to fix it, is provided by David Goldhill in the NYT on February 17, 2013 “The Health Benefits that Cut Your Pay”, and also in his new book on health care referenced therein.
Clearly the cost of health care is a huge fiscal and economic issue for our country.  Health care entitlements, such as Medicare and Medicaid, are the main drivers of the national debt.  The rapidly growing cost of Medicaid is also a huge problem at the state level because it is crowding out support for other essential major programs such as education and infrastructure improvements.  The cost of private health care paid by employers holds back wage gains and is a major factor in the growing income inequality in American society.
It is time for Americans to demand action on health care costs from our national political leaders.  It is a problem which affects almost all of us and therefore should be amenable to a bipartisan solution in Congress.  We need to get this message out much more strongly!

The Deficit Deniers Should Do the Math

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Barron’s Gene Epstein recently had a column entitled “The deficit deniers should do the math”.  He presents a chart from the Census Bureau showing that the percentage of the U.S. population age 65 and older, now 22.6% of the total of working age Americans, will hit 30% by 2023, ten years from now, and 36.6% by 2040.
Right now there are 4.4 people of working age supporting each senior citizen.  By 2040 this ratio will fall to 2.7 working age individuals supporting each senior.  If we’ve got trillion dollar annual budget deficits now, how in the world will we pay for Medicare and Social Security in 2040 when there will be so many more seniors to support?
The Congressional Budget Office predicts that, under current trends, budget deficits will fall to about $400 billion in the next few years and then begin to rapidly increase after that.  The Deficit Deniers conclude that the problem therefore isn’t urgent and so we can safely postpone action until the economy is more fully recovered before we start to worry about the deficit.  This is very short sighted indeed.
We’ve had an anemic 2% annual growth recovery so far from the recession which ended four years ago.  What if the recovery continues to limp along without picking up steam?  We’ll still have the same demographic time bomb to deal with a few years from now, and we’ll be in no better shape to deal with it then than we are now.
With a President and Senate Democratic majority unwilling to address our urgent economic (7.6% unemployment) and fiscal (enormous annual deficits) problems in a serious manner, without demagoguery, the outlook for progress is grim indeed.

How Can American Health Care be Reformed?

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The total cost of health care in the United States is roughly 18% of Gross Domestic Product, almost twice as much as for any other country in the world.  It is common knowledge that health care entitlements such as Medicare and Medicaid are huge budget busters for the federal government and are a big reason why it is so difficult to get government spending deficits under control.  But the cost of private health care is also increasing rapidly and is a big contributor to the stagnation of middle class income in recent years.  In other words, the exorbitant cost of health care has a negative effect on the entire American standard of living and the problem is just getting worse and worse.
Everyone who is concerned about this problem should read David Goldhill’s new book: “Catastrophic Care:  How American Health Care Killed my Father – And How We Can Fix It” and can start with his article in the September 2009 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. He has an approach which should appeal to liberals and conservatives alike.  All American citizens would be covered from cradle to grave but “health care is fundamentally best left to the market to maximize innovation, quality and efficiency”.  The basic principle is that insurance would only be used to cover real risk rather than the certainties of life such as routine illness and the infirmities of old age.
This ideal is accomplished with a “Balanced Health System: health accounts, health loans, and catastrophic insurance with a very high deductible”.  Of course it will be complicated to switch over an entire health care system to a new operating framework.  Of course there are thousands of details to work out.  Of course there will be strong criticism of any such concrete recommendation for radical change.
The point is that our current system is unsustainable.  Do we change it in a deliberate, rational manner or do we rather delay until a fiscal crisis of some sort occurs?  It is encouraging that our national leaders are working together on such issues as immigration reform and stricter gun control.  But our economic and fiscal problems are much worse and more urgent than these social issues.  We need leaders who have the vision and capability to move us forward on addressing our most fundamental problems.

Why Medicare is Such an Enormous and Urgent Fiscal Problem, II

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The National Institute for Health Care Management has just issued a report, “Health Entitlement Spending: A Story in Six Charts”, which describes in great detail why federal health care spending is such an enormous fiscal problem.  First of all, health care spending is already 21% of total federal spending in 2012.  This spending will more than double in the next ten years.  Annual Medicare expenditures are already double the revenue received from the Medicare Part A Payroll Tax and premiums paid by Medicare recipients.  This gap will continue to steadily widen in the coming years because recent retirees will only pay in total a small fraction of their lifetime benefits.
Every year since 2006, the Medicare Trustees have issued a determination of “excess general revenue Medicare funding”.  By law the President must respond by submitting legislation to correct the problem and Congress must likewise respond on an expedited basis.  But no corrective action has been taken so far.
All federal programs should operate efficiently and much can and should be done to achieve greater efficiency across the whole spectrum of federal programs.  But Medicare is the “sine qua non”, (without which, nothing) for spending reform.  Nothing else matters unless we can get Medicare spending under control.
One way would be to raise Medicare Part A taxes for everyone and also raise premiums for well-to-do Medicare recipients.  And then we’d still have to severely restrict Medicare benefits.  This would be drastic action indeed.
Another way is to give (refundable) tax credits to everyone who applies for Medicare and let them find their own insurance coverage on the private market.  This would create a huge incentive for recipients and their families to pay close attention to health care costs.
Each of the above alternatives would bring radical changes to our Medicare system.  But either we act now in a deliberate, and hopefully rational, manner or else our national debt will grow so rapidly that there will be a new fiscal crisis much worse than what happened in 2008.
Which of these three scenarios do we prefer?  Right now we have a choice!